A really nice project from the Editions at Play team at Google, in which blockchain is used both to limit supply to a digital book (only 100 copies made) and, as the book is passed on, to make it ‘age,’ in the sense that each reader must remove two words from each page and add one of their own before passing it on (that they are obliged to do). Eventually, it decays to the point of being useless, though I think the transitional phases might be very interesting in their own right.

I was thinking something very vaguely along these lines would be an interesting idea and had started making notes about how it would work, but it seemed so blindingly obvious that somebody must have already done it. Blockchain technologies for publishing are certainly being considered by many people, and some are being implemented. The Alliance of Independent Authors seems to have the most practical plans for using Blockchain for that purpose. Another similar idea comes with the means to partially compensate publishers for such things (as though they needed even more undeserved profits). Another interesting idea is to use Blockchain Counterparty tokens to replace ISBN numbers. However, A Universe Explodes is the only example I have so far found of building in intentional decay. It’s one of a range of wonderfully inventive and inspiring books that could only possibly exist in digital media at the brilliant Editions at Play site.

Though use of Blockchain for publishing is a no-brainer, it’s the decay part that I like most, and that I was thinking about before finding this. Removing and adding words is not an accurate representation of the typical decay of a physical book, and it is not super-practical at a large scale, delightful though it is. My first thoughts were, in a pedestrian way, to build in a more authentic kind of decay. It might, for instance, be possible to simply overlay a few more pixels with each reading, or to incrementally grey-out or otherwise visually degrade the text (which might have some cognitive benefits too, as it happens). That relies, however, on a closed application system, or a representation that would be a bit inflexible (e.g. a vector format like SVG to represent the text, or even a bitmap) otherwise it would be too easy to remove such additions simply by using a different application. And, of course, it would be bad for people with a range of disabilities, although I guess you could perform similar mutilations of other representations of the text just as easily. That said, it could be made to work. There’s no way it is even close to being as good as making something free of DRM, of course, but it’s a refinement that might be acceptable to greedy publishers that would at least allow us to lend, give, or sell books that we have purchased to others.

My next thought was that you could, perhaps more easily and certainly more interestingly, make marginalia (graphics and text) a permanent feature of the text once ownership was transferred, which would be both annoying and enlightening, as it is in physical books. One advantage would be that it reifies the concept of ownership – the intentional marks made on the book are a truer indication of the chain of owners than anything more abstract or computer-generated. It could also be a really interesting and useful way to tread a slightly more open path than most ugly DRM implementations, inasmuch as it could allow the creation of deliberately annotated editions (with practical or artistic intent) without the need for publisher permission. That would be good for textbooks, and might open up big untapped markets: for instance, I’d quite often rather buy an ebook annotated by one of my favourite authors or artists than the original, even if it cost more. It could be interestingly subversive, too. I might even purchase one of Trump’s books if it were annotated (and re-sold) by journalists from the Washington Post or Michael Moore, for example. And it could make a nice gift to someone to provide a personally embellished version of a text. Combined with the more prosaic visual decay approach, this could become a conversation between annotators and, eventually, become a digital palimpsest in which the original text all but disappears under generations of annotation. I expect someone has already thought of that but, if not, maybe this post can be used to stop someone profiting from it with a patent claim.

In passing, while searching, I also came across http://www.eruditiondigital.co.uk/what-we-do/custos-for-ebooks.php which is both cunning and evil: it lets publishers embed Bitcoin bounties in ebooks that ‘pirates’ can claim and, in the process, alert the publisher to the identity of the person responsible. Ugly, but very ingenious. As the creators claim, it turns pirates on other pirates by offering incentives, yet keeping the whole process completely anonymous. Eeugh.